What you need to know:

Any “partner” creator who earns a cut of ad revenue but doesn’t agree to sign its revenue share deal for its new YouTube Red $9.99 ad-free subscription will have their videos hidden from public view on both the ad-supported and ad-free tiers. In other words, YouTube will remove all videos from your channel if you don’t agree to sign with YouTube Red. This has already happened to tons of channels, and is the first reason why YouTube Red is terrible.

Next, YouTube is already fucking over creators with low pay.
Creators currently receive 55% of advertising revenue on their videos, which is way lower than similar streaming competitors like Spotify (70%) and Apple Music (71.5%).

If you sign up for the free trial, the channels you watch will be making significantly less than they already do from you. Instead of getting money from the ad you watch before every video, they get a split portion of the $4.50 from your YouTube Red subscription. They will be splitting it based off of how many minutes of their channel you watch, which means channels with high quality short videos will be punished by channels with longer ones.

Also, $10 is a fucking ripoff for something that has been available to use for years. Nothing that YouTube Red is offering is groundbreaking or new. You can use any of the hundreds of sites online to download videos and AdBlock has existed since forever.

I don’t want to read all of that, can you recap it?

YouTube is blackmailing channels into participating

YouTube Red will punish creators, especially ones with shorter videos

YouTube Red will not be paying the creators as much money as they deserve

The price of YouTube Red is fucking absurd, when you consider that the features of it have been available for years using other sites and apps.

Now, you’re probably thinking, what can I do to combat this bullshit?

DO NOT SIGN UP FOR YOUTUBE RED. Even the free trial. We need to not support this service in any way, it’s the #1 way we can fight it.

Need to download a video for offline use?Use a different service. I Personally recommend clipconverter.cc.

If you use AdBlock, please turn it off, for the next 30 days at least. This will help our favourite channels out during all of this nonsense. I have nothing against you if you use it, however it’s the best way to help out right now.

Support your favourite creators through other means! Many channels have a Patreon you can pay them through, or have a store where they sell shirts and stuff. These are fun ways for both the channel and you to get cool stuff!

Do not trust YouTubers talking about YouTube Red. Many of them are sponsored by YouTube, and are basically being paid to tell you how good it is and why you should get it, such as Pewdiepie. You shouldn’t ever trust the opinion of someone being paid to promote something. Do your own research and form your own opinion.

Reblog this. There’s no better way to help out than to spread the message yourself.

This is the best we can do for now. There’s also a petition to sign. YouTube doesn’t need to listen to it, and really it’s pretty meaningless, but it’s another way to show your hatred for YouTube Red. Click here to check it out.

Thanks for reading, guys! I can’t emphasize how important this will be for the future of YouTube, and the entire internet in general, so please don’t ignore this. It’s a serious problem and we need to show out discontent.

I love watching cr1tikal’s public presence turn from chaotic neutral to chaotic good. The first big sign was donating his funds from Youtube partnership, and now he makes videos about how corrupt textbook prices and police drug tests are. They’re mixed in with infomercial parodies and laden with ridiculous profanity, but he’s doing good for humanity and I love that.

So yesterday, YouTube dude @cr1tikal posted a video called Finger Family Mystery. In it, he details a strange. sprawling assortment of videos littered all over YouTube, each with millions of hits, almost zero comments, and always featuring a benign children’s nursery rhyme.

As it turns out, he’s right; a quick search of “Finger Family” nets you nothing but hundreds of these videos. Why do they exist? I decided to probe. Watching one of the videos didn’t enlighten me, but then I had the radical idea of watching the videos on Internet Explorer, where I don’t have AdBlock.

Shock and terror: all of the videos are monetized. Suddenly, the sky opens up and the truth is clear. These videos aren’t being made to be watched. They’re being made to generate money.

Remember how YouTube’s copyright and monetization system works? It’s a combination of the ads and the total minutes watched. The Finger Family videos vary; the smaller ones are only about a minute and a half long, the longer ones are up to 90 minutes, and in the middle they range from 15-30 minutes.

Now, copyright. The nursery rhyme “The Finger Family” is public domain, so anyone’s free to stick in a book of nursery rhymes and sell it. There are copyright characters all over these videos, sure, but none of the original material is being used; it’s all half-baked animations cobbled together using familiar faces. It’s pissing on the face of copyright law. And assuming these videos are being churned out by some Chinese company (where copyright laws are FAR more lenient), this could very well not have any copyright hurdles to start with.

But who’s watching the videos? No human being. Most likely, it’s a bunch of computers set up to watch these videos, click an ad, reload the page, and so on. Who’s making the videos? Again, not a person. The content’s being generated by automated systems that grab premade assets and familiar characters and automatically generate a video.

This is all speculation, of course. I could be entirely wrong. There could be a Finger Family Cult hidden beneath the crust of the Earth, and watching these videos is part of a daily ritual. But as that seems unlikely…

TL;DR: These videos are being automatically generated and watched so that whoever owns the videos can make a ton of money off of ad clicks and views.